I like steady competition but at the same time i was really getting tired of waiting for nvidia to come out with something. After all the extra time they took what they released isn't worth the money in any way whatsoever and that is disappointing to me. I purchased my 5870 about 2 weeks ago and was waiting on the release of the fermi cards so that i could decide whether i made a good choice or not. and the way it looks i think i have made an excellent choice. My 5870 is quieter, draws less power, seems more user friendly as far as oc'ing, bios modding, and drivers. It's been a long time since i've used ati cards, and i couldnt' be happier i switched back. This release of fermi just made me all the happier.

Nah. For this generation of cards, I see ATI as the winner, simply because of the low power consumption, low temps and excellent scaling. For these reasons, I'll be sticking with ATI for quite awhile. This saying a lot, since I was an Nvidia guy for a very long time.

I strongly believe that competition is great for the customer and was tempted to pick this option but the power/heat/noise issues with Fermi have me quite satisfied with my current 5870. No plans to buy nvidia this generation.

I think Fermi 2 will be the winner, seeing that Nvidia should have fixed the problems by then, while ATI is moving away from their trusty R600 based cores to something new (the same way as Nvidia moved away from G80).

I think Fermi 2 will be the winner, seeing that Nvidia should have fixed the problems by then, while ATI is moving away from their trusty R600 based cores to something new (the same way as Nvidia moved away from G80).

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We cannot expect everyone to screw up like what NV did with Fermi hmmm lets see what happens

Imagine GTX480 in the summer , you have to keep the AC on full speed just so the video card doesn't burn.
Imagine GTX480 in a closed case with not so good ventilation and after 1 year of dust build up , and in the summer .
Can i speculate that most GTX480's will end up RMA ?
Now about perf. , it's no denying it's faster than HD5870 but not enough to really matter , it consumes about 100-120W more , it's very very hot to the point of OMG it might ignite the case , it's loud but some people might not care about this , it has a much higher price.
To imagine how high the price is for some country's , the card leaves asus/gigabyte/xfx and it's ready to be shiped to xxx country , that country has some customs taxes for IT/Tehnology stuff , when it gets in stores another tax is applied ( VAT ) , after these taxes the reseler adds his price too , Romania's price for GTX480 is 800$ or 600 euros , HD5870 price is 480$ or 362 euros, WHO THE FUC... IS CRAZY TO PAY SO MUCH FOR SO LITTLE ?
What made Nvidia rich is not GPU computing , it's the gamers who spread the word Nvidia is great and convinced other people to buy Nvidia , so what is Nvidia doing now ? GPU computing ? accelerating encoding and some photo/video editing software ? ati does this too and it doesn't really matter much , most of us just play games , watch movies and surf the net on the computer , we are not professionals to need this
The Nvidia plan now is let's get some game developers to sign our TWIMTBP and force Physx , crank up some absurd need of tesselation to the point Ati hardware will suffer and force the developers to avoid contact with Ati for optimizations.
Until they deliver some good games that meet the above requirements i don't see anybody giving a shi.. about GTX480 , so start scheming Nvidia if you want to make a sale.

Quite an impressive card, if it was a few dollars cheaper and a few degrees cooler and a few watts.....

But why exactly weren't these cards 512 core? Did they disbale a few cuda cores for better yields? Are they likely to release 485's with 512 cores? And in turn will ATi release 4890's to compete with that?

Quite an impressive card, if it was a few dollars cheaper and a few degrees cooler and a few watts.....

But why exactly weren't these cards 512 core? Did they disbale a few cuda cores for better yields? Are they likely to release 485's with 512 cores? And in turn will ATi release 4890's to compete with that?

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Yep better yields is what I read a few weeks ago. Hopefully they will be releasing 495 485 475 during the summer.